Curation Suite™ is a powerful content curation platform with 3 main tools.

• Web Portal - Located at app.curationsuite.com. You'll use the portal to access and setup your Listening Engine (a powerful cloud based content discovery platform).
• Chrome Extension/Firefox Addon - Our browser tools so you can curate to the top CMS platforms. With the browser tools you can access your Listening Engine, search for content to curate and publish. It also has a few other features like saving stories and more.
• WordPress Plugin - a WordPress based plugin that works with any theme or plugin you have. With the plugin you can search for and curate content right within your dashboard.nbsp;

Curation Suite™ gives you the power to publish high quality converting content quicker & easier than ever before.

It doesn't matter if you are a complete content newbie or an experienced content marketer or blogger-- Curation Suite™ is designed to give you an edge with content marketing.

With it's simple point, click, and curate interface you'll be publishing content in seconds.

You'll be able to easily build authority in any market or niche with Curation Suite™'s advanced but easy to use content finding tools and platform.

Discover hot & trending content that your audience will crave, that will drive clicks and traffic, and ultimately conversions.

The best part is... Curation Suite™ is easy to use and works right within your WordPress dashboard alongside any theme or plugin you have and is designed to ensure you do curation right.

Below you'll discover just how powerful Curation Suite™ is and how you can use it to your advantage to publish more content than you ever have before...

Here's a few of the standout features:

• Quickly Find Content - CurationBot, Google News, Bing News, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, DailyMotion, Pocket, Giphy, Slideshare, ImgUr, Instagram
• One-Click Curation - for quickly adding sources and creating content
• Visual Editor - for easily selecting specific content from a source  
• Curation Shortcuts - Use the CurateThis shortcut for on the fly curating
• AddStory Shortcut - Save a story or link for later curating with the AddLink shortcut
• Social Sharing - Direct sharing on social media
• Social Integrations - Schedule for later or share immediately with Hootsuite or Buffer
• Training and Tutorials - Includes training and tutorials for learning the best methods

Using the Curation Suite™ Plugin, allows you to curate and publish content that engages your readers and puts you in a position of authority.

* The Curation Suite Plugin is the foundation of our entire system and required to run the Listening Engine or any other additional modules.

It installs as a plugin and works with any existing theme or plugins you have installed.

For more advanced content discovery and publishing features, you can add the Listening Engine to the Curation Suite Plugin

Yes and more. One of the parts of Curation Suite is a robust plugin that works right within your WordPress dashboard. It works with any theme and any plugin you have.

Yes, you get unlimited site licensing with Curation Suite™.

This means you can use Curation Suite™ on as many of your own sites that you would like.

Yes, absolutely beyond a doubt.

We ensure Curation Suite is WordPress compliant and will work alongside any theme or any other plugin you have.

The curated content you create with Curation Suite is added in a no footprint approach. What this means is Curation Suite does not rely on content layout tricks or special shortcodes for the content to be displayed. That means however content (posts) look on your site with your current theme they will look the same when using Curation Suite.

One final thing... with Curation Suite you'll have no issue with what is called "Plugin Lock"-- meaning if you ever disable our plugin all your content will remain, look as it should and be right where you posted it.

Yes. Curation Suite will work on any host that supports WordPress 3.8+.

We consistently update Curation Suite & the Listening Engine. On average our release cycle is every 2 weeks.

We really strive to ensure our ChangeLog is complete with all details of all updates or fixes.

Yes. Curation Suite was coded with PHP7+ in mind and is fully compatible. In fact, everybody should be running PHP7.1 if your host & all your plugins supports it.

Curation Suite comes with multi-story technology that enables you to easily curate content from multiple sources on one post.

That means you'll be able to publish high quality round up posts in seconds.

Want a good example of quality round up posts? Check out our week WordPress Week in Review posts.

Here's a training video that showcases how easy it is to do roundups:

Yes. Curation Suite gives you the power to curate videos in 2 ways.

The first option is by using the content on demand search where you can search YouTube by keywords (sorting by most recent, popular, likes, views, etc) right within your WordPress dashboard. You can watch vidoes and easily add them to your post with a click of a button. You can also add thumbnails or set the thumbnail as a featured image.

The second way is using the CurateThis shortcut. When using the CurateThis shortcut Curation Suite will parse the content you curate looking for embeddable videos. Currently Curation Suite finds YouTube, Vimeo, and some 3rd party site videos (places such as CNN.com & ComedyCentral.com).

The way to look at how the shortcut works is if it can be embedded on your site Curation Suite helps you easily discover and embed it using on click shortcuts.

Curation Suite™ scours the content you are curating and finds special content pieces you can add to your curated post.

These are usually Tweets, Facebook updates, or Google+ updates. For instance, imagine you are on a site that has few embedded Tweets from Twitter. You could visit those Tweets on Twitter and click to get the embed code. Curation Suite™ does this automatically for you. It's a little more complicated but that is basically how it works.

Curation Links or the Curation Links Module allow you to save links to stories, blog posts, vidoes, and other related content you come across. Curation Links allow you to save content so you can at a later time curate.

Curation Links are categorized by Link Buckets. You can create your own link buckets or add all your links to the built in link bucket named Quick Add Links. The Quick Add Links link bucket is for links you adding using the QuickAdd shortcut bundled with Curation Suite™.

Traditionally Curation Suite and the tools we create are one step below auto curation. There's many reasons why you don't want to auto curate but the main one is it simply doesn't work-- pleased don't believe what other tools and platforms promise.

That being said... we aim to please so we are starting to add some auto curation features, here's the latest releases:

• Auto Trending RSS Feeds
• Curated RSS Feeds

But you just said it doesn't work...?

If you want a little more information on why we've been against auto-curation check out this story: Why Automated Curation Never Works

That's what you'll use the Listening Engine for. The Listening Engine integrates with Curation Suite™ and includes robust RSS discovery features, social data, and more. Learn more about The Listening Engine.

Yes. With Curation Suite you can limit functionality by user level.

As an example, let's say you have a site with a series of writers but you don't want to give them access to Curation Suite functionality. You can limit your site just Editors and above, meaning only editors will be able to curate and access Curation Suite's functionality.

There are 4 options for access levels:

Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor

Curation Suite works with any standard WordPress post, page or with custom post types.

This advanced functionality means you can curate content just about any place in your WordPress site.

No, currently there is no demo available for Curation Suite.

We do have a full technical demo and videos covering every features on our main page.

We also have a tutorial videos and a full detail manual covering every feature of Curation Suite.

Curation Suite is the future of where we are taking curation. It really is the single best content curaiton platform for WordPress that you can find.

The Curation Traffic plugin was officially retired September 2016. We took everything we learned from the 4+ years with Curation Traffic and put it into building Curation Suite from the ground up.

Using the Curation Suite™ Listening Engine is like having a expert team of full time content assistants scouring the web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week giving you prime, hot, & trending click-worthy traffic generating content to curate, publish, and share. Here's a few stand out features:

• Your personal niche/market magazine
• Finds content Google Alerts doesn't even find
• Hot & trending content with social media share sorting
• Publish curations with one click
• Discover top and trending videos from YouTube (sift and sort by views, comments, likes, dislikes, and social data).
• Add your own websites and RSS feeds
• Plus many more features made for expert curators and publishers...

The bottom line-- The Listening Engine allows you to quickly & easily find content to curate, publish and share in any market, topic, or niche.

The Listening Engine is custom technology, running on our servers that Curation Suite™ connects to via an API key to access your specific content discovery settings.

All content the Listening Engine discovers is easily accessible within WordPress from the Listening section or within any post or page.

Once the Curation Suite™ Listening Engine is set-up by our team for your specific market or niche, it finds content automatically, in real time so you always have quality content to choose from.

No, the Curation Suite™ Listening Engine Add-on is API driven content discovery platform, not a WordPress Plugin.

You access the Listening Engine within your WordPress dashboard. This allows the Listening Engine to be a powerful content discovery tool without adding additional processing or slowing down your site.

To access the Listening Engine it is required to have the Curation Suite plugin activated on your site.

Yes, Curation Suite™ is a WordPress plugin and is required to run the Listening Engine Add-on. Curation Suite™ comes with everything you need to easily curate content from around the web. But by using the Listening Engine Add-on, you drastically reduce the time searching for quality content to curate.

You can fully customize your Listening Engine immediately after you purchase.

To get started quickly you can start by adding from our over 1,000+ master topics. Master topics already have highly focused keywords and websites/feed attached.

Here's a quick overview video showing some of the management features in action:

Yes, the Curation Suite™ Listening Engine is designed to find quality content in any niche or market. For this to be possible, a single Listening Engine "platform is custom tailored to find the best content for you to curate, share, or read in your specific market, niche, or industry. This standard Listening Engine license comes with one platform and 6-8 topics focused on a single vertical niche or market. See "How Does the Listening Engine Find Content? if you need to curate to multiple niches.

The Listening Enigne discovers content by keyword searches, websites/feeds, and our proprietary content discovery platform.

You are able to fully customize your Listening Engine to your liking. You can setup your own topics, keywords, and websites/feeds. You can also change and update these as you see fit.

All the content discovered within your Listening Engine also has social share data consistenly updated. In addition your Listening Engine also pulls in trust data like MOZ Score and our own CQs (Curation Quality Score).

You can activate a single Listening Engine Platform on as many of your own websites as you like.

One thing to keep in mind is each Listening Engine Platform is created for a specific market or niche. So if you activate a Listening Engine Platform on multiple sites you are interacting with the same Listening Engine Platform. The Listening Engine Platform is not specific to your site it is a hosted application that you are accessing within your WordPress dashboard.

An example of how this works is let's say you have the Listening Engine turned on within site1.com and site2.com. If you ignore a piece of content within site1.com it will be ignored at site2.com. Usually this is the desired result because both of these sites will be in the same market or niche.

In cases where you have multiple sites in different niches we suggest creating a separate Listening Engine Platforms. Activating the Listening Engine Addon on multiple sites really only makes sense if the sites are in very similar niches or markets.

Yes absolutely. You can create your own topics, add your own keywords, and add your own websites/RSS feeds. You can also add one of our 1,000+ master topics and customize from there.

Yes, you can easily ignore a keyword; block a single story, or every article from a particular domain. Right now, our team helps manage these setting for you, we are currently building a user interface for easily changing these setting for each Listening Engine Platform.

Access the quick curation feature that allows you to create a curated news section of your site giving your site even more content. Click Below to watch a video overview:

Here is our Curated News Page .

Simply by clicking the add-to-post button, you can add the exact headline, image, and summary that was generated by the Listening Engine to the post box.

Using One-Click Curation is great for building round-up posts and it often takes only seconds to create a post. Now with this feature more than ever and like with all good curations, we recommend checking out the rest of the story and adding commentary before publishing. But just by being able to click one button, and pretty much build a post, saves a ton a time.

Click below to watch a video overview:

Your purchase of Curation Suite comes with 1 standard Listening Engine Platform.

Our standard Listening Engine Platform Level allows for 6 Topics with an overall limit of 24 keywords and 60 websites/feeds.

You do have the option to upgrade your Listening Engine to an advanced or custom Listening Engine platform. There is an additional cost for both of these options.

You also have the option of adding multiple Listening Engine platforms to your account. Additional standard Listening Engine platforms are a $25 provisioning fee plus a monthly ($9.97) or yearly ($97) subscription fee.

Each separate Listening Engine platform has it's own topic, keyword, and feed limit.

We recommend using multiple "Platforms” if you are curating within more than one market or niche because then your content and settings are separated for each industry.

No. Curation is a highly accepted way to share information as long as you always site the source of your curated content.

Curation Suite™ along with and most other curation platforms and most major companies including YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, operates under the Fair Use doctrine within the United States Copyright Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use ).

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law , fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test .

The Fair Use Doctrine does offer protection to users and ourselves in case of involuntary copyright infringement. But attribution is a must with all curation.

Curation Suite™ automatically links to the original source and provides fields for easily styling quoted text.

However, if you copy and paste the whole original story, then you're clearly infringing copyright unless you've obtained permission from the content owner to do so.

If you are questioning whether or not you should curate a particular piece of content, the best thing is to ask for permission from the content owner.

Ultimately, we are not lawyers and we can't guarantee that all curations will not violate copyright law. However, we have actively been curated content for 3+ years now and can confidently say that most content creators support curation, many are even curators themselves, and they enjoy the free publicity it provides for them and their content .

Content Aggregation : Getting together in one single place different pieces of online information so that someone can access them from a single URL. That can be automatic or manual. Pieces of content doesn't not need to have anything in common.

Content Curation : It is the process of discovering, gathering, adding value, presenting and making accessible a set of contents, despite its formats (video, audio, text, images...), which describe or define a topic or matter from the point of view of the content curator.

With content curation you're doing 2 things.

You're referencing another source of content and then adding your own thoughts (usually this is called adding commentary).

Content curation is used by just about any major site you can name and includes any national and local news site, buzzfeed.com, noteworthy.com, huffingtonpost.com, techmeme.com, drudgereport.com, msnnow.com, and so on.

In fact, if you've followed any well-known site you'll discover they add more and more curation to their content mix as they grow. They do this for one reason... more traffic.

The web is all about eye balls and how many people you can get to your site to see your advertising and your offers. Curation is the quickest way to do that .

As far as using other people's content, you're putting into action exactly what happens on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and all the sites mentioned above.

The technical aspect you're using is called fair use. Fair use is a section of the copyright law which allows citation of content and related works. Obviously the key word is citation and not taking the whole article without permission.

Short answer is yes. The copyright law allows for people to cite sources, stories, videos, and ideas. The key element once again is cite and not reproduce in whole.

Simply copying a story is theft and even if you get away with it once eventually either the owner or someone else will call you on it.

If you want a full and complete run down here's one of the best in-depth analysis that covers just about every detail on fair use and how it relates to online media.

The biggest benefit we've already covered...

With curation it means you have more content, more traffic, more eyeballs, and more conversions.

But there's something just as powerful happening behind the scenes...

Well, there's 2 things really, these are called the first impression trigger and the authority association effect.

Curation done correctly means the main draw will be your opinion, your thoughts and your ideas and the original story is the launching pad for that.

This is taking advantage of the "First Impression trigger (we'll cover this in more detail in a follow up email) just know that people remember the first impression or contact they have with content more than what happens thereafter. It's a powerful content marketing tactic we've only recently discovered and I can't wait to share more about it.

Exactly what is the process that you follow to curate content?

In some ways we all curate given how we share things with social media, share things with our friends, co-workers, and family via email. But today we talk more about employing content curation as an inbound strategy.

There really are 5 core steps to how curation works:

1. Decide what you want to be known for.
2. Find your sources
3. Curate and add commentary
4. Publish your curated piece of content
5. Promote

So, what's the difference between curating content and pirating? How can you be sure that what you do remains under the label of curation and doesn't cross over to pirating? Well, though the two may seem very similar, where ethics are concerned, they are actually vastly different.

Pirating is stealing. It describes taking content word for word or concept for concept, whole or in part, and publishing it. There's no other way to put this-- it is simply wrong.

Content curation, on the other hand, is not stealing. It is ethical because it involves only using carefully selected parts of the content, adding relevant commentary or insight, or highlighting specific parts of it, and always assigning credit to the content's originator. In other words, you add to the discussion involving the content.

The difference is not even subtle; pirating is stealing and it is unethical. This includes article spinning, where words or ideas are stolen from somewhere and changed just enough to make it appear to be original content. It rarely does appear to be original, which hurts the reputation of those who practice article spinning. Not only is it clear that they are practicing piracy by stealing the original content, but they are also taking efforts to cover that fact; something that is not held in high esteem by many people, including the search engines who may block such content.

Content curation, on the other hand, is not done in the shadows of the digital marketplace. It is an honest endeavor that adds value, offers fresh perspectives, and enhances the ecosystem of ideas that is the digital landscape.

Curation vs Creation - is it a epic battle or the perfect combination for a content marketer?

First up, you'll never have all the ideas in your market or niche. So when you add the strategy of content curation then your market (let's say the people in your market) have greater potential to discover you with ideas and concepts they care about.

With this example (and others I could cite) I would find it hard to argue that you shouldn't consider adding curation... even if you created your own info-graphics. As an aside, I've never really liked info-graphics but here in the next few weeks we have a few coming out... I'll let you know how they perform.

THE APPETIZER FOR YOUR MAIN COURSE

There's an argument I've heard (and I apologize for not knowing the exact source) it says curation is like an appetizer and your unique content is the main course.

For instance, let's say you include curated content within a blog where for every original post you've curated 3 pieces of short form curation. Now imagine someone who visits your site via a curated article that they found it really informative.

What if as they scan over your site they see the popular posts sidebar widget (these convert well for us). Most likely the content listed there is going to be unique content (or you've set it up that way). So this visitor came in with curation (appetizer) and they eventually got to your original content (the meal).

Usually your curated content acts as a "teaser bringing people to your site. Once there they look around a bit and discover your other curations and unique content.

HERE'S ANOTHER CONTENT CURATION STRATEGY TO EMPLOY...

Here's why this makes sense. Let's say your curating the top thought leaders and ideas in your market. Now throw your own content in the mix. Suddenly your content is on the same level as leaders and other top ideas in your market.

If you've heard the saying, "you are the company you keep- well this is true in the content game as well. What better way to gain authority than to be on the same platform as the greats in your market?

WHEN WILL CURATION OVERSHADOW YOUR UNIQUE CONTENT?

When your content sucks. When your content has no heart. When your content doesn't have a unique perspective and parrots everything else or everyone else in the market. Then it's just part of the noise. I've found even bad writing with a bite converts better than polished writing with zero heart.

Let's say someone visits your curated platform and they begin scrolling down your main page. As they scan they see headlines and images, they slowly digest and decide if they want to click further. If the content you've created has no unique perspective or doesn't create unique interest then it's just as likely to get passed over.

The goal is to have your content stick out and be so enticing that when compared to the other curated pieces it creates more clicks than anything else.

Here's a question we get often... does content curation help in my search engine optimization (SEO) ?

This was something we really worried about when first we first started curating. We didn't want to be penalized by the search engines when we upped our curated content. The main reason why was some of our best converting offers come from search traffic... so we beyond a doubt we didn't want to send the wrong signals.

WHY DOES CURATION HELP?

Here's the top 4 ways that Curation can help with your SEO...

1. Search engines need signals - When you curate content from credible sources it shows that you have a trusted and authoritative site.
2. It adds life to your site - Search engines love more and more content. When you curate you typically are adding 4-10 posts a day, more content equals a more living and breathing site.
3. It keeps your site relevant - typically you're curating things that are cutting edge in your market. When you curate in any market you're typically sharing the latest trends, news, and tips. The search engines pick up on this and see your site as relevant to the market.
4. Curation helps build authority - The more authority you have (in real life) the more trusted your digital content becomes.

Most of the curated content that we created included a few sentences of the original article, commentary of a few sentences and a link back to the original source.

1. Cite only those portions of the headline or article that are necessary to make your point or to identify the story. Do not cite the story in its entirety.

2. Try not to use all, or even the majority, of articles available from a single source. Limit yourself to those articles that are directly relevant to your audience.

3. Prominently identify the source of the article.

4. Link to the original source of the article.

5. When possible, provide context or commentary for the material you use.